A History of Game Changers

Drawing on extensive research, the Humanitarian Policy Group, part of the Overseas Development Institute, is leading on providing a historical perspective of the key episodes that have shaped the international humanitarian system and contributed to how it looks and functions today.

​The international humanitarian system has developed significantly over past decades in no small part due to key moments in its history that not only encouraged, but frequently forced it to re-evaluate basic assumptions and introduce change. The conflicts in Biafra and the genocide in Rwanda, for example, raised fundamental ethical questions about the role and impartiality of international humanitarian aid, the simultaneous, large-scale disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the 2010 Haiti earthquake called into question the response capacity and effectiveness of the current system. Likewise the civil wars in Sri Lanka and Syria have highlighted challenges to the presumed universality of humanitarian action and the lack of consistent political solutions to situations of extreme violence and restricted humanitarian access.​These events, along with slower, systematic changes, such as the waning of totalitarian states, the increase in global trade and the rise of information technology, have prompted changes both in the structure of the humanitarian sector, as evidenced for example by the creation of the UN’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs, subsequently, OCHA, as well as processes such as the ‘the cluster system’. We will provide a brief analysis of key moments in the history of the humanitarian system, an overview of how they shaped the evolution of the system in terms of policy, structure, and processes, and finally some suggestions about what we can learn from this history.​